The magazine aims to identify and examine photographic practices that share the ground with contemporary art processes, new image technologies and matters related to global culture.

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Ciel variable 81 - MADE IN CHINA

[Spring 2009] This issue focuses on the side effects of the accelerated modernization of China: Shanghai is portrayed in an odd half-light that bespeaks the end of an era; landscapes discoloured by dust storms testify to a rapid desertification; a city that lives under water hints at vast tracts of land that have been submerged… […]

[Spring 2009] by Jacques Doyon In this issue, we bring together images testifying to the impacts of accelerated modernization in today’s China. The photographers who made them have varying degrees of professional experience linked to commissions for the media, corporations, or advertising. They have nevertheless cultivated a personal vision and produced photographic series based on […]

[Spring 2009] Until recently, a former resident of Shanghai from the 1930s or 1940s, returning to the city decades later, would have a good chance of being able to locate his or her old home since urban development for profit was suspended for nearly a half century. However, as Shanghai modernizes, entire neighbourhoods that were […]

[Spring 2009] In November 2008, Benoit Aquin won the prestigious Prix Pictet for his series on desertification and dust storms in China. One of the greatest environmental disasters of our time, the Chinese “Dust Bowl” is probably the largest conversion of productive land into sand anywhere in the world. In November 2008, Benoit Aquin won […]

[Spring 2009] In 2009, the Three Gorges Dam will have flooded hundreds of square kilometres in central China. Chinese artist Yang Yi will see his hometown, Kaixian, being submerged during the last phase of the project. Employing mastery of both photography and digital techniques, Yi shows us ghost towns engulfed by water whose inhabitants, fitted out […]

[Spring 2009] We live in an age of disappearances, a time of loss and change, with mass extinctions and vanishing eco-regions. These profound, sinister planetary transformations remind us of the intimate link between ourselves and our actions in the visible world. Yet it seems as if this rapid unravelling has left us dumb with dread and […]

[Spring 2009] “… a change in time is enough to re-create the world and ourselves.” — Marcel ProustDespite his pioneering role in the development of musique concrète, Hugh Le Caine (1914–77), a well-known physicist, inventor of electronic musical instruments, and self-taught composer, remains a relatively obscure figure: information about him is limited almost exclusively to […]

[Spring 2009] Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington 11 October 2008 – 18 January 2009 Over the past three decades, Richard Misrach has created a body of work that attempts to reconcile his two lifelong passions: a socio-political activism forged during his student days at Berkeley in the late 1960s and an affinity for images of […]

[Spring 2009] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page. Galerie Leonard et Bina Ellen, Université Concordia 29 août au 11 octobre 2008 Commissaire : Séamus Kealy (Blackwood Gallery, Université de Toronto / Mississauga)

[Spring 2009] Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 3, 2008–January 11, 2009 Despite fulfilling several different roles during its century-plus history, the Carnegie International exists today as a quadrennial exhibition of international contemporary art. This second-oldest exhibition of its kind opened just months after the first edition of the Venice Biennale, but today the Carnegie International is only […]

IPS gallery, Montreal November 1 – December 20, 2008 From Barack Obama’s gay-inclusive acceptance speech to the controversial passing of the Prop. 8 ban on gay marriage, the lives of gay Americans are, for better or for worse, on the public radar in the United States. Molly Landreth moves beyond party platforms and ballot boxes, embarking on […]

[Spring 2009] Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery Concordia University, Montreal October 23–November 29, 2008 Curator: David Tomas, with the collaboration of Michèle Thériault and Eduardo Ralickas The commingling of academia and art in Tim Clark’s conceptual practice is announced at the outset of his recent retrospective exhibition with the installation of a small shelf […]

[Spring 2009] The internationally known artist Antoni Muntadas will present a new exhibition titled The Construction of Fear at Galerie SBC art contemporain in Montreal, from 28 February to 18 April 2009. Muntadas is interested in social, political, and communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and the ways that channels […]